Efforts to market Colorado's agricultural products abroad are focusing on the Caribbean Basin, and specifically Cuba, as the state works to find customers for the bounty it produces.

Colorado Agriculture Commissioner Don Brown told two groups on Wednesday that, with the loss of the Trans Pacific Partnership a year ago, ag trade missions have been hard pressed to find new markets for U.S. ag products. But finding markets is what his boss wants him to do, Brown said, and during remarks to the Progressive 15 Ag/Water Summit in Yuma Wednesday, and again Wednesday evening at the Colorado Corn Growers Association's Awards Banquet in Burlington, Brown said he intends to do just that.

"Our governor gets it," Brown said. "He came from private business and private industry, and his philosophy is sell, sell, sell. We don't need everything we grow here in Colorado so we have to find export markets."

Brown said trade delegates from the western U.S. are focusing on the Caribbean now, where consumers are interested in dried beans, lower level cuts of meat, dried milk, and potatoes.

"Those are all things we're very good at growing here in Colorado," he said.

Brown said Cuba is especially promising because of the shift away from support for the 60-year-old trade embargo against Cuba, and if a few stumbling blocks can be overcome, the country is rich with opportunity.

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"Their economy is in shambles, but we're seeing a shift from Fidel's to Raul's regime, and we anticipate another shift soon," he said. "They started privatizing restaurants because that affects tourism, and they've realized that privatization creates cash flow."

Cash is important, Brown said, because any trade done with Cuba at present must be done on a cash basis; no one is allowed to extend credit for Cuban purchases.

Agriculture is in a particularly good position because the Cuban ag system is virtually nonexistent. Brown said 80 percent of Cuba's food is imported, but the island nation's traditional trading partner, Venezuela, is leaving the market because of its own internal strife.

"But as Venezuela is leaving, China is arriving," he said. "Cuba's collective farm system failed, and now only 5 percent of arable land is in agriculture. During the height of Russian influence, they had thousands of tractors. Now they're using farm technology from Jesus' time."

Brown said he was able to establish some personal relationships with some of Cuba's high-ranking political leaders, and he hopes he can build on those relationships, if U.S. leadership will lift the embargo.

"Our representatives in (Congress) want that embargo lifted, but to do that there needs to be a political component," he said. "We've made some progress in making those political contacts, and now we need to follow through."

Brown hinted that the pivot to the Caribbean is necessary because of the collapse of the TPP a year ago. President Donald Trump fulfilled a campaign promise to withdraw from the TPP on Jan. 23, 2017, three days after taking office.

Under the terms of the TPP, Brown said, tariffs against U.S. beef in Japan would have dropped from 37 percent to 9 percent, making the U.S. competitive with Australia in that market. Instead, in the absence of TPP, trade with Japan reverted to World Trade Organization rules, which allowed Japan to raise beef tariffs to 50 percent, which happened in July.

According to a Reuters News Service report published in Fortune Magazine in July 2017, the tariffs hit U.S. beef exports especially hard because Australia, Mexico and Chile have economic partnership agreements with Japan that exclude them from the high tariff. The article said prior to the new tariffs, Japan is the top recipient of U.S. beef exports and represented one-fourth of all U.S. beef exports.

Brown said he is seeing similar pressure to "re-negotiate" the North American Free Trade Agreement in the mistaken perception that the U.S. suffers a "trade deficit" with its neighbors to the north and south.

"Look, here's Canada with a population of 35 million people, less than some of our largest cities, and here's Mexico with a population of 130 million people, and here's the U.S. with a population of 325 million," Brown said. "We have almost twice the population of the two of them put together so, yeah, I'd guess there'd be something of a deficit. No way they're going to buy the same amount from us that we buy from them. But we need NAFTA, and we need it to stay in place. (Canada and Mexico) have choices, they can trade with somebody else if they choose to. We are not the king."

Brown concluded by saying his office would continue to work hard, in cooperation other with states' ag departments, to strengthen existing markets and find new ones.

"It's what our governor wants, it's what I want, and we're pretty sure it's what you want," he said.

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